3,473. 3/25/2002

“On March 25, 2002, The New Yorker published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg on the Kurds. Goldberg had traveled to northern Iraq, spending time in an area governed by Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). PUK officials escorted Goldberg to visit a prison in Sulaimaniya, where they were holding members of Ansar al-Islam, a religious extremist group of Kurds and Arabs who had trained in al Qaida camps in Afghanistan. The Ansar prisoners were accused of colluding with the Iraqi regime. According to Goldberg, the charges were that: ‘Ansar al-Islam received funds directly from Al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein had joint control, with Al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.’ ”